There’s been discussion of Limbaugh’s demented accusation that the crafty masterminds of Team Obama somehow, retroactively to 1993, managed to brand this summer’s Batman-movie supervillain with a name to invoke dark resonances against the GOP contender. Professional media speculation seems divided as to whether Rush is demented enough to believe this tosh, or if he’s just feeding garbage to his deluded listeners. Which reminded me of Jon Chait’s recent NYMag post on “The Paul Ryan Rosetta Stone“:

I have harbored a long and controversy-provoking obsession with the two tomes that played such a formative role in Ryan’s intellectual development. Five years ago, I wrote a book about how anti-tax fanatics gained and kept control of the Republican Party…One small point that appeared in both my book and the excerpt provoked particular ire from conservatives. That was a detailed description of the lunacy of Jude Wanniski and George Gilder, who wrote the two books that defined supply-side economics (Wanniski’s The Way the World Works and Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty).

My argument was that the economic arguments offered in both books is pure nuttery, but because they used economic concepts, and many people feel unqualified to judge economics, the nuttery is hard for non-specialists to spot. But it’s easy to see that they’re nuts because they have a host of beliefs on all sorts of subjects (Saddam Hussein never gassed the Kurds, E.S.P. is real, etc.) which make their general madness apparent to non-economists.

Some conservatives insisted their wide array of insane beliefs is irrelevant to gauging their economic arguments. (American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett dismissively wrote, “Even if one assumes that a theory has been put forward by an unbalanced person, that fact does not mean that the theory is incorrect.”) The more common objection was that I overstated the influence of Gilder and Wanniski. …

Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck — have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.”…
As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy, like the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States or that the health care bill proposed establishing “death panels.”…

In his blog Mr. Sanchez pointed to a comment at redstate.com about the Manzi-Levin hullabaloo that epitomizes the attitude: “I DON’T CARE,” if every fact and figure is correct, the poster wrote; “more importantly, the principles were timeless and correct.”

A philosopher of the Church — or maybe one of the characters from Orwell’s 1984 — argued that when the experience of reality conflicted with sacred principles, then reality must be made to conform. If the world is supported in space by four elephants standing atop the back of a giant turtle, there’s no point in asking what supports the turtle; the believer is serene in the “fact” that it’s turtles, all the way down. President Obama is both so ignorant that he can’t speak without a teleprompter or get respectable grades at the universities to which he was given illicit affirmative-action access, and a criminal mastermind capable of a global conspiracy to forge his own birth certificate… or to arrange for a conservative comic writer to invent a supervillain in 1993 for use against an opponent in 2012. If such were not true, then why would “everybody know” these seemingly contradictory things to be true?

What has attracted less attention, however, is the extent to which the Egyptians who vented their rage during Mrs. Clinton’s visit appear to have been inspired by fears that the Obama administration harbors a secret, pro-Islamist agenda which originated with American conservatives…

In an online conversation on Monday, when Matt Bradley of The Wall Street Journal asked an Egyptian blogger named Sara Ahmed for proof that the Obama administration was “financing” the Muslim Brotherhood, she directed him to a blog post about American aid to Egypt by an ultra-conservative Canadian blogger, Judi McLeod. Ms. McLeod’s post was based on a news story posted on Lucianne.com, a site run by Lucianne Goldberg, an American conservative who played a central role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

As Mr. Bradley pointed out to Ms. Ahmed, though, Ms. McLeod had badly garbled the original news report, which simply said that the U.S. had decided to release $1.3 billion in aid to Egypt’s military in April. Ms. McLeod falsely reported that the money had been given instead to a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood leaders who visited Washington around the same time…

Ms. Ahmed then directed Mr. Bradley to a transcript of a recent conversation between two American conservatives who claimed that Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, was participating in a Muslim Brotherhood plot “to penetrate our government.”

Mirrors and paranoia, all the way down! Can you imagine how Bush press flak Ari “Watch what you do, watch what you say” Fleisher would have greeted a mind-meld between DFHs and unruly, disrespectful non-Americans?

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Anne Lauriehttps://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgAnne Laurie2012-07-19 02:46:162012-07-19 02:46:16Nutballs and Mirrors, All the Way Down

My district’s lovely and gracious Congressional representative, Michele Bachmann, just got spanked by John McCain for trumpeting this story as though it were remotely credible. Apparently she’s getting all her information from the Internetz too. It’s a good thing my taxes are paying good money for her to find out the secrets about government employees that, you know, a background check suitable for that level of security clearance wouldn’t find out. Who needs the FBI anymore?

Some conservatives insisted their wide array of insane beliefs is irrelevant to gauging their economic arguments. (American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett dismissively wrote, “Even if one assumes that a theory has been put forward by an unbalanced person, that fact does not mean that the theory is incorrect.”) The more common objection was that I overstated the influence of Gilder and Wanniski …

I remember telling friends after Obama’s election that folks like Limbaugh and Beck would become even more vicious than they had been. Voters gave the black liberal guy a decisive victory over the white conservative guy, and I just knew that they all would double down to inflame the fan base that they had left. That’s why I believe they want Obama to win again. Otherwise what would they have to complain about?

If she loses re-election, maybe she can jet off to join those in agreement with her regarding being anti-vaccination in their campaign.

Pakistan’s drive against polio was thrown into disarray Tuesday after a foreign doctor working on a vaccination campaign was shot, a day after the Taliban reiterated a ban on immunization in the country’s tribal areas, officials said.
__
A three-day nationwide immunization program was launched Monday, but the Pakistani Taliban prohibited its administration in parts of the tribal area, the militant-infested zone that borders Afghanistan, putting about 280,000 children at risk.… Source

“When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it,”

Okay, good for you for sticking up for this lady. But ask a staffer what “specious” means before you use it, dumb-ass.

He might well have chosen a harsher term (mendacious comes to mind), but I can’t begrudge his use of specious in the sense of demonstrably false yet put forward in a manner so deceptive as to sound as if it might not be false.

Hey – I’m wondering if someone has an old post saved. I can’t find it.

I don’t remember much of it, though, which makes searching for it hard. It was a long list of racism directed at the President by teabaggers and ended with a line that was something like “eventually you have to admit that racism is the face of your party.”

Off topic – but this item from my hometown, Wichita, shows that “they” never quit trying. The execs ran the company into ground, conducted many lay-offs, declared bankruptcy, and sold the company (Beechcraft) to the Chinese. Now they want bonuses….

And yet, they are winning. They owned both chambers of Congress for most of the last 20 years, they got a Texas simpleton elected and re-elected despite his miserable history and lack of ability, they own a 3/2 advantage in State Governorships and the majority of State legislatures. And in the face of the full failure of their control, with every bit of evidence of their incompetence, their greed, their sociopathic lack of concern for this country and its citizens on full display they can nominate the poster child for their real values and he will do no worse than ‘really close’ but he also may win by that margin.

From the mid 90’s till ’10 I kept thinking people would see the obvious and turn the ship around. After the ’10 debacle I thought “OK, a blip but this will get people to see what the GOP really is”. But no. The stupidity only burns if you are capable of rational thought and critical thinking. The only conclusion I am left with is a large plurality of the voting public has neither of those skills (and is wildly proud of it!) and will not see the train until they are ground under the driver wheels.

@NotMax: Sadly, in this case, their reaction is based in a reality — as the article you quote goes on to explain, we used exactly that sort of immunization ruse to try to find bin Laden. And when it came out, a lot of commentarors noted it would have exactly this effect.

It’s true they had already a long-standing animosity to the projects, but, hey, we have Jenny McCarthy and a bunch of other folks on this side of the world saying things not too dissimlar, so why throw stones at people who know these projects were used to infiltrate their country?

And it would have happened too if we’d had an across the board Republican-majority Congress, SCOTUS, and President for the next 4 years6 years 8 years!

It’s all the Democrats fault, especially that liberal, George W. Bush. The market NEVER would have crashed if we’d had a Republican House in 2008 and a president who was a REAL CONSERVATIVE! Someone like Dick Cheney or Roger Ailes!

The wingnuts can get away with their wingnuttery, flourish even, because we have the most ignorant electorate in human history.

Part of that ignorance is due to the media, but most is the result of apathy, lack of education/knowledge and tribalism.

I’m not sure how, or if, that changes. But something has to give, because this country is on the verge of giving power back to the very same party that got us into this mess, which will just accelerate our decline.

Because people of any ilk or alliance who use their position to promulgate long-standing, long disproven bizarre myths such as that of the polio vaccine (specifically) being manufactured to target and sterilize Muslims have stood themselves up as proper targets of derision.

This is something they’ve been doing for a long time. The misguided and ham-handed CIA use of a medical professional engaged in the same field provides a handy excuse to bolster and help consolidate the local Taliban’s power, but it does not and ought not serve as justification for their antediluvian ongoing anti-vaccination blarney.

Takes a hell of a lot for the apathy/tribalism combo to be overcome, and it’s always temporary when it does.

Between the last fifty years of U. S. politics and the way I’m watching the far right creep its way back into “mainstream” respectability back in France, it’s got me wondering if a stable liberal democracy is even possible over the long term, or if having unhinged, identity-obsessed and power-mad lunatics in power is a permanent feature in the system. Probably the latter.

Sooooooo, let me try to understand this. Our Secretary of State is attacked a mob in a Middle Eastern country and this is a good thing. Conservatives are deliberately encouraging anger and hatred towards the United States in a Middle Eastern country with lies and this is a good thing. Maybe I just don’t understand how patriotism works.

There’s been discussion of Limbaugh’s demented accusation that the crafty masterminds of Team Obama somehow, retroactively to 1993, managed to brand this summer’s Batman-movie supervillain with a name to invoke dark resonances against the GOP contender

The liberal machine takes the long view. I mean, is it really out of the question that Hollywood released the rat movie Willard in 1971 specifically to prevent George Romney from mounting another Presidential campaign? And of course they did it by going after one of his kids…

@melior: It is true that just because someone thinks that their hypothesis was transmitted to their fillings via secret Illuminati radio waves does not mean the theory is false. However, it does mean that the hypothesis should be viewed with considerable scepticism rather than simple-minded acceptance.

@NotMax: The reason the Pakistani Taliban is opposed to vaccination is that a doctor conducting a vaccination campaign turned out to be working for the CIA, and was the guy who spotted bin Laden for us.

Democrats and liberals hate America. Ergo, anything that hurts, harms, irritates, or otherwise bothers them must therefore be not only good for America but encouraged to destroy those Illegals-loving, Baby-hating, Economy-Killing Green Fascists for the good of Jeezus Christ, Esq., blessed be his dollar bills. Amen.

I see from Sargent in the Plum Line morning post that the polls out this week have been changing samples numbers (the Q poll from Virginia oversampled white voters) What the hell are these guys doing, trying to keep the horse race narrative up?

In his blog Mr. Sanchez pointed to a comment at redstate.com about the Manzi-Levin hullabaloo that epitomizes the attitude: “I DON’T CARE,” if every fact and figure is correct, the poster wrote; “more importantly, the principles were timeless and correct.”

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell – it doesn’t matter if a particular policy works or not according to the concrete results (you know, those pesky facts) produced by that policy, as long as the policy is consistent with conservative principles. Conversely, if a given policy is not consistent with conservative principles, it must be destroyed at all costs no matter if the policy is producing results that a reasonable person would consider desirable.

The difficulty lies in the sea change that conservative principles seem to undergo depending upon who resides in the Oval Office. Deficits under George W. Bush? We don’t care, we love the guy! Deficits under Barack Obama? Drive him from office!

The difficulty lies in the sea change that conservative principles seem to undergo depending upon who resides in the Oval Office. Deficits under George W. Bush? We don’t care, we love the guy! Deficits under Barack Obama? Drive him from office!

An extrapolation:

Deficits under Romney? The guy’s a genius! He’s bleeding the Chinese dry selling them Treasury paper that pays next to no interest! More deficits, more! Masters of the Universe once more!

@Hill Dweller: It would be best for everyone concerned if she were to just shut the hell up — stick to carefully scripted campaign appearances, defer all other questions to the campaign staff. I don’t know if the campaign staff is too stupid to throw a net over her or if Willard in all his political genius is preventing them from doing so, but she’s a noticeable drag on an already floundering campaign.

@Jewish Steel: Specious seems to be a word that has changed its meaning over time. If you read older literature (up through the 1920’s) you will find that “specious arguments” mean apparently sound, plausible whereas now it means the polar opposite. Very puzzling.

According to Charlie Pierce, there is a group in Wisconsin going through the recall vote from June and has been finding systematic errors in the electronic voting machine tallies. Justin Bieber, this is all we need. On the other hand, as far as I can tell the group that is doing the recounting does not seem to be getting pushback from folks who would have something to hide if the machines were in fact rigged.

@karen marie: I think the Brad blog misses the importance of the 2009 tax returns. Since he voted in Jan 2010, residency probably had to be established in 2009. The Belmont house was bought in 2010 and residency could easily be established for 2010. But 2009? Not as likely.

@NotMax: “The misguided and ham-handed CIA use of a medical professional engaged in the same field provides a handy excuse to bolster and help consolidate the local Taliban’s power, but it does not and ought not serve as justification for their antediluvian ongoing anti-vaccination blarney.”

There was some other time that I wrote that whatever happens, the stupid party wins. This seems to be another one of those.

Semi-topical in an utterly bizarre way. I need to thank AL for her title because now I want to make an entirely nut-based meatball to go with pasta. I’ve had walnuts in pasta and lasagna with great joy but the nutball format had yet to occur to me. Tusand tak Y mille graçias

@jwb: The wingnuts’ panic tells you far more than the polls. They know the Bain and tax returns are toxic for Willard. I suspect the Obama campaign will start in on Romney’s ‘saving’ the Olympics soon.

Between the last fifty years of U. S. politics and the way I’m watching the far right creep its way back into “mainstream” respectability back in France, it’s got me wondering if a stable liberal democracy is even possible over the long term, or if having unhinged, identity-obsessed and power-mad lunatics in power is a permanent feature in the system.

A Republic presumes a active Citizenry. But we don’t have “citizens” in this country, we have “consumers”.

Given recent poll numbers, I’m about ready to declare the American public too stupid for democracy. Fuck ’em.

If Romney wins in November? I’m done with politics, and going with ‘prepare for systemic collapse sometime in the 2030s’ as my long-term life plan.

@Chris: as long as the 27% can vote would-be oligarchic dynasties will find a way to use them to destroy democracy. The problem is universal suffrage. As long we remain committed to this enlightenment mis-conception, there is no hope.

Its a trait in humans to hold on to certain “ideas” in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. They DO change, however, and you have to keep it up..

Great article in this months Harper’s magazine which seems like a downer at first. Its about the impending collapse of midwestern farming due to a number of practices including the misuse of modern means of farming. It follows some pioneers who are trying to get the word out in the face of huge hostility from the largely farming population. What is interesting and important is that while they remain hostile, they are starting to think because they can’t refute the reality of what is happening in front of them… Still, it is taking them a lot of evidence and a lot of pain to even start to question.

We can’t give up. We just have to keep laying it out there and confronting the illogic and fear with reality. It doesnt feel good but it is OUR duty, really.

I can’t disagree that there are people out there who are either so dumb or so ill-intentioned that they have NP business voting, and in an ideal world maybe we could weed them out. The problem is I can’t think of a single weeding-out procedure that couldn’t instantly be abused by the “oligarchic dynasties” in question.

Universal suffrage is the worst electoral system, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.

There’s been discussion of Limbaugh’s demented accusation that the crafty masterminds of Team Obama somehow, retroactively to 1993, managed to brand this summer’s Batman-movie supervillain with a name to invoke dark resonances against the GOP contender

Hmmm Ruch must be running a test to see just how fucking much ignorance he can push on his moronic audience before they finally figure out that he is a grifting asshole who has been scamming them and taking them to the cleaners for years while becoming rich of of their rank stupidity.

@Valdivia: yeah Mason/Dixon oversampled 65+ voters and undersampled black and hispanic in the florida poll.The sampled 65+ at 33% which is almost twice the Fl demograhic that says 65+ in FL is about 18%
Purple Strategies current polls showing tightening of races, doesn’t even give crosstabs of their sampling demographics

In regards to the lunacy of a big chunk of the U.S. population (such as those who keep returning Bachmann to the House), if 27% are outright half-hinged wingnuts who believe whatever Rush tells them, and a similar percentage are still somehow undecided, well, that puts those who are either informed or utterly disinterested in politics in the thin minority. I suspect we’ll continue to watch things ebb and flow. We are seemingly at the ebb tide now, what with people taking wingnut pundits so seriously, disbelieving in global warming, fearing “the gays”, and such.

I have to say, that segment of people who simply “don’t know” or “can’t decide” is confounding to me. I think you could ask them, “Was Hitler a good person?” and some of them would say, “Well, I just don’t know… he was a dynamic public speaker, after all….”

“Was Hitler a good person?” and some of them would say, “Well, I just don’t know… he was a dynamic public speaker, after all….”

It’s an outgrowth of the “Flat Earth? Views differ!” phenomenon described by Krugman and others. Of course, the root cause is the decimation of the public education system, majorly aided and abetted by the Rethugs. Which is just the way they like it – I’ve seen surveys correlating high percentages of low-information (f/k/a “stupid”) voters with red states.

Yes, I’ve seen those surveys, too. It seems fairly clear that those who are truly in power of the Republican party want Americans to be just smart enough to hold down a nice service-sector job and be moved by the stirring and nuanced words of Rush, Hannity, Savage, Coulter, Malkin, et al. The rest of us? Commies, moonbats, tree huggers, perverts, freaks. Oh, if only they could turn us into Soylent Green!

If you watch the 60 Minutes interview with Grover Norquist, you will hear him tell of how he developed the “no taxes–ever” political strategy when he was 15 years old. I remember thinking at the time that my country had been delivered to hell in a hand basket because of the idea of a 15 year old. La sigh.

As a philosophy prof I feel obligated to note that Chait’s argument (as presented here) against Gilder and Wanniski is a logical fallacy. Just because the two have demonstrably false ideas on other topics it doesn’t necessarily mean that their economic ideas are false. On this point Hassett is, in fact, correct.

The economic ideas should be judged on their own merits, regardless of their source. Once one rigorously does so, one finds that the economic ideas of Gilder and Wanniski are, in fact, nuts.

my country had been delivered to hell in a hand basket because of the idea of a 15 year old.

Well, I was going to be a smart-ass and write something about Howard Jarvis being a lot older than 15, but I guess Norquist was 15 a few years before Jarvis did his thing (may both of them burn in Hell forever).